Argument from Outer Space

Some strange twists are required to account for “the blob” form, the “tactile” form that stubbornly fails to reveal itself except in movement (insistence of the virtual). Strange void related smudges also show up in the vicinity of blobs elisions, where events of vitally affects funnel directly into the network on the blob’s surface in contravention of standard graduations of “pure” geometry.

Understanding the blob and its topological surface will have to wait for an event that maximises the potential of its affective “life”: an event connecting the blob (itself an unfolding potentiality) to its lived diagram: its bio-gram. The most promising events are also topological hyper-surfaces, in which the blob is described as a network of epiphytic structural moments, continuous strands in unimaginable contortions.

Two of the most vexing questions for architects are the questions that every critic asks: if the building is a blob, then how can a blob function as an affective container? And, why build the blob before the technologies for fully realising its potential transformative affects are available, and how can we build blobs of tactile and affective meaning for architecture?

The surface of a blob might not be a surface at all, but a recursion that plays with the diagram of its program to cause an irruption of its form, from where the surface unfolded in the first place.

Argument from Inner Space
A building lives in three dimensions only in the folds of its fabric. The “Euclidian” space of the building is a membrane. The membrane isn’t closed. It folds in at the doors, windows, ducts, vents, risers, and other openings and unfolds as an emergent diagram. The diagram connects through the structure to fold back out through the programmatic space as a lived bio-gram. This is one leaky ‘container’.”

At a certain level unpredictable events of inhabitation and sensation settle into a renderable diagram. It is the undependable events aggregation that can be depended on: their manner of folding into and out of themselves in the emergence of the building’s topological skin-as-membrane.

A façade could be as sparse and fuzzy as a delicate mohair shawl. Nothing actually joins. The building’s “surface” is pitted by emptiness. Nor is there anything solid within this un-facade. The space within/without is a delicate network of intense nodes of activity, some registering only as blurred glimpses of frenzied movement, some experienced as recursive traces of inhabitation. The effective form of the building emerges from the interrelation of these intensive, incorporeal events and traces as a lived bio-gram.

You need to build a network of event-movement-sensation spaces. We are hinging the accretion of small events to build a larger networked blob. What we think of, as a building’s form is a mutual holding in relational stability of incorporeal affective spaces: relative to circulation, program and massing. Incorporeal: abstract. The building is the modulator of lived experience. It is a certain kind of modulating urban hinge event.

All the goings on and passing by around the blob-enfolded body constitute another aggregate of relation: a sea of movements, each of which has a potential effect on the building, capable of modulating the programmatic threads that are pulled from the relational continuum it carries. Which threads the building re-expresses is regulated by the modulatory sense-interferences that the skin, mouth and eyes – not to mention vaginas and anuses– let past. Certain program elements, pathways, and tactile surfaces are backgrounded, peripheralized or blended out by the synesthetic economy of movement-across that is regulated by the movement of the body in-folded with the blob.

To build the building as blob, as biogram would be to accept that the building’s ultimate form is as effectively incorporeal, as really abstract as its diagram. The building’s form is not just structure and program. As a vitality event, a building unfolds on texture, sensation and movement. The building’s “ultimate” form” is the events bedded in its virtual network of connections. They are the tiny movements on the level of a single journey through its space. They are the textural k(nots) lying at the crossroads of twisted surfaces coursing through its tactile fabric.

The blob/building is a holding-together of these vitality affects as they fold out, recursively-durationally, in the loopy present, in determinate form and configuration, always provisional because always in becoming.

The form of the blob/building, its lived experience, cannot be understood without reference to abstract-real processural dimensions. These cannot be contained in the building’s built fabric alone. They must be virtually described, using an array of concepts specially honed for the body; touch, sight, propriopecption, vicerality, expression, affect, movement, distraction, playfulness to name just a few.

In what way does a given building’s affective resonance with intensive movements in the urban realm allow us to extend architecture, in our orientations, memories and brain-lagged awareness toward it’s (and our) creative variation? How can blobs make a qualitive difference as Hemiepiphytic objects in architectural discourse and the urban fabric?

Once again these are pragmatic rather then critical issues. It’s a question of design intent. Choosing to design buildings as helictitic blobs is to choose potential modulation not only of architecture but, through their affect, the interface of the urban/body. It was not the purpose of this essay to suggest particular design methods, aesthetics or ideal end effects. It was only to suggest that new paths might be found by letting go of the sterile opposition between “slippery” blobbiness / vasodilating networks and form driven “pure” geometry, and its fellow travellers, expressiveness and the logically programmatic.

To do this, it is necessary to take another look at the design “process” and the stopping problem and even broach such tired subjects as the existence, or not of peramorphosis. The fear that this will inevitably fall into a pointless, meandering from the “logical” or “correct” result of an architectural generative process, in spite of itself, is not justified.

Form alone is not enough. A building must be a sparkling networked event. It is onto-nodal, supra-formal. It is a density of connection that twists geometrical form and programmatic content into knots – twisting back on itself for its own furtherance, its continuing beginning. Networked means connected. The network registers traffic, re-accessing powers of spontaneous formal eruptions, for more effect. It is the existential equivalent of lifting oneself up by the bootstraps: formal and (k)not form.

This is also where the architecture of blobs, networks, topological forms, helictitic. Hemiepiphytic call it what you will is carnally challenged and proves inadequately potent(ialising). It does well with the process. It does less well with the elicited product (the stopping problem). Putting the two together is necessary for grasping the potential of the blob as an affect generator.

Use your imagination: no single form, geometric or otherwise, is flexible enough to encompass the concrete abstractedness of experience in all its ins and outs. Just as the blob lives between building and network, designing for it requires operating between pedagogies. To be sufficiently fuzzy, blob architecture needs to welcome the trans-formal.

The trans-formal (surpassing, transcending) is not trans-formational (into another state or place). It doesn’t operate at the level of form. It enters the fabric and twists both form and function to get a sense of what may come. It is pragmatic. It imaginatively enters the affective interface; whether it is building/body, form/function, or program/expression and pulls as may strands as it can to see what emerges. It is effective. Rather then trans-formational, it is supermodulatory.

Look only to the network – and it will bring you density.

Look only to Sensation – and it will bring you response.

Look only to the twisting – and it will bring you surface-as-membrane.

Look only to blobbiness – and it will bring you affect.